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A cultural history revealing how Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post shaped modern American gender roles by turning magazines into powerful engines of commerce and identity.
Before mass media influencers and modern lifestyle brands, there were magazines that helped define what it meant to be American—and what it meant to be a man or a woman.
In Magazines for the Millions, Helen Damon-Moore offers a compelling cultural history of two of the most influential mass-circulation magazines in U.S. history. Through rich archival research and incisive analysis, she reveals how these publications did more than entertain: they actively shaped gender identities while pioneering new forms of commercial culture.
Tracing the evolution of the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post from their origins through their transformation into national institutions, Damon-Moore shows how editors, publishers, and readers together constructed powerful—and often competing—visions of femininity and masculinity. From Cyrus and Louisa Curtis's early editorial partnership to Edward Bok's reinvention of the Journal and George Horace Lorimer's shaping of the Post, the book uncovers how gender and commerce became deeply intertwined in the making of modern media.
Engaging and deeply informed, this study illuminates how "women's" and "men's" magazines both reinforced and complicated cultural expectations, ultimately revealing the blurred boundaries between domesticity, consumer culture, and public life in turn-of-the-century America.
"Helen Damon-Moore's Magazines for the Millions is both entertaining and analytical, loaded with telling comparisons of the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, sharp observations about the magazines' content, their production, and readers' responses. Her insights about gender construction are important for all readers interested in popular culture. I found fascinating the story of how the Post floundered as a men's magazine while the Journal soared on the wings of 'gendered commerce.' The book is a fine example of a new genre of studies of the history of print culture." — Carl Kaestle, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Before Hugh Hefner, Ted Turner, and Oprah Winfrey there were Cyrus and Louisa Curtis, Edward Bok, and George Horace Lorimer. In this incisive cultural study, Helen Damon-Moore brings vividly alive the world of the great mass magazines that shaped the outlook of generations of Americans. Exploiting primary sources and current theoretical perspectives, Damon-Moore documents the magazines' role in the commercialization of gender and the gendering of commerce. Magazines for the Millions merits the close attention of all students of American popular culture—and anyone looking for a good read." — Paul Boyer, Institute for Research in the Humanities
"In this absorbing history of the early years of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal, Helen Damon-Moore provides a penetrating look into the construction of gender in America's first mass-circulation magazines. Anyone interested in the evolution of modern ideals of femininity and masculinity will profit from reading Damon-Moore's account of these two formative institutions." — Rosalind Rosenberg, Barnard College
Helen Damon-Moore is Adjunct Professor of Women's Studies and Education at Cornell College. She is co-author of Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Man, a Woman, and a New Magazine: Cyrus Curtis and Louisa Knapp Curtis and the Ladies' Home Journal, 1883–1889
2. From Gendered Lives to a Gendered Magazine: The Content of the Journal, 1883–1889
3. A New Editor and a New Voice: Edward Bok Transforms the Journal, 1890–1900
4. Mixed Messages in a Commercial Package: The Content of the Journal, 1890–1900
5. Creating a Magazine for Men: Curtis Gets the Post and the Post Gets Lorimer, 1897–1900
6. Speaking to and about Men: The Content of the Post, 1897–1900
7. The Journal is for Women and the Post is for Families: The Vicissitudes of the Curtis Magazines, 1900–1910
8. Oppositions and Overlaps in Views of Women and Men: The Content of the Journal and the Post Compared, 1900–1910
Epilogue
Methodological Note
Notes
Bibliography
Index